Noir
Tarot of Dreams - Strength
On assessing my previous posts, I think that perhaps they were a bit too comprehensive and really did not provide much room for other people to contribute. My apologies. I will attempt to keep my posts shorter so as to encourage more interaction.
Bursten’s commentary on the triumvirate of the Chariot, Strength, and the Devil is interesting. He suggests there is an inner power that is beneficial if mastered or tamed, but dangerous is it is not. This is reminiscent of the Freud’s accounting of the id, the part of the tripartite psyche that contains all of our impulse and drives (the other parts are the ego and super ego). In Transactional Analysis, this would roughly map onto the ego state of Child (vs Adult or Parent). The reader should be aware that this Freudian conception of the inner nature comes with a price. While I acknowledge the value of Freud’s work, I have a great deal of resistance to his rather simplistic, mechanistic, and often adversarial rendering of the inner landscape. For example, much of the Western criminal justice system is influenced by Freudian thinking, the idea that there is something bestial inside people that needs to be either contained or controlled via punishment. Given that I believe we all know the price we pay for such a system, I will not belabor the point.
My sense of the card Strength is less Freudian, less fear-based, and more organic. To me, the essence of the Strength card is personal evolution. What makes the card so fascinating is that challenges the card evokes changes as the person’s life situation changes. If we take the tiger to symbolize energy, the id, biological drives, qi, or what have you, we could note that where a person in their twenties is struggling to understand and master the tiger, a person in their fifties is struggling to deal with the diminishment of the tiger’s presence. In the later case, Strength takes on a very different significance.
Given the wealth of symbolism surrounding the lion, I was curious why Ciro chose to substitute a tiger so I asked him. He mentioned that there was no overarching symbolic reason – he simply wanted to do something different. To me, this is very much in alignment with my observation that the ToD provides an opportunity for the reader to find new meanings and perspectives in looking at the Tarot. To give one example, Bursten makes a very clever observation about the “Lady and the Tiger” story, which fits perfectly with this card. If you are not familiar with this story, it is worth seeking out.
Ultimately, I agree with Bursten that the card speaks to mastery, but I feel that this mastery is the blossoming revelation of what a person’s life purpose is vs the heroic subjugation of some unruly energetic undercurrents. In the inner tradition of Chinese medicine, one is called to nurture this seed of purpose or destiny, and it is the lack of attention to this task that is problematic, not so much that one’s life force is wild or out of control. It is the difference between seeing one’s child as an undisciplined hellion that needs strict guidelines or seeing one’s child as a garden that requires time and attention to reach its full potential. In medicine, it is the difference between conventional medicine, which sees the body as a chaotic piece of meat that requires the continual benedictions of the priestly physician, and naturopathic medicine, which sees the body as infused with an intelligence that, if listened to and respected, can provide a type of healing that is not achievable through the ingestion of petrochemicals and the removal of body parts.
On assessing my previous posts, I think that perhaps they were a bit too comprehensive and really did not provide much room for other people to contribute. My apologies. I will attempt to keep my posts shorter so as to encourage more interaction.
Bursten’s commentary on the triumvirate of the Chariot, Strength, and the Devil is interesting. He suggests there is an inner power that is beneficial if mastered or tamed, but dangerous is it is not. This is reminiscent of the Freud’s accounting of the id, the part of the tripartite psyche that contains all of our impulse and drives (the other parts are the ego and super ego). In Transactional Analysis, this would roughly map onto the ego state of Child (vs Adult or Parent). The reader should be aware that this Freudian conception of the inner nature comes with a price. While I acknowledge the value of Freud’s work, I have a great deal of resistance to his rather simplistic, mechanistic, and often adversarial rendering of the inner landscape. For example, much of the Western criminal justice system is influenced by Freudian thinking, the idea that there is something bestial inside people that needs to be either contained or controlled via punishment. Given that I believe we all know the price we pay for such a system, I will not belabor the point.
My sense of the card Strength is less Freudian, less fear-based, and more organic. To me, the essence of the Strength card is personal evolution. What makes the card so fascinating is that challenges the card evokes changes as the person’s life situation changes. If we take the tiger to symbolize energy, the id, biological drives, qi, or what have you, we could note that where a person in their twenties is struggling to understand and master the tiger, a person in their fifties is struggling to deal with the diminishment of the tiger’s presence. In the later case, Strength takes on a very different significance.
Given the wealth of symbolism surrounding the lion, I was curious why Ciro chose to substitute a tiger so I asked him. He mentioned that there was no overarching symbolic reason – he simply wanted to do something different. To me, this is very much in alignment with my observation that the ToD provides an opportunity for the reader to find new meanings and perspectives in looking at the Tarot. To give one example, Bursten makes a very clever observation about the “Lady and the Tiger” story, which fits perfectly with this card. If you are not familiar with this story, it is worth seeking out.
Ultimately, I agree with Bursten that the card speaks to mastery, but I feel that this mastery is the blossoming revelation of what a person’s life purpose is vs the heroic subjugation of some unruly energetic undercurrents. In the inner tradition of Chinese medicine, one is called to nurture this seed of purpose or destiny, and it is the lack of attention to this task that is problematic, not so much that one’s life force is wild or out of control. It is the difference between seeing one’s child as an undisciplined hellion that needs strict guidelines or seeing one’s child as a garden that requires time and attention to reach its full potential. In medicine, it is the difference between conventional medicine, which sees the body as a chaotic piece of meat that requires the continual benedictions of the priestly physician, and naturopathic medicine, which sees the body as infused with an intelligence that, if listened to and respected, can provide a type of healing that is not achievable through the ingestion of petrochemicals and the removal of body parts.
